Talk:Bio mods/@comment-77.99.96.186-20130602222418/@comment-79.172.98.189-20130803180209
Colouring them as it is now is pointless, and after a while only confuses people. As anyone who did enought consequtive memory tests could tell you, what helps in memorization initialy might ruin it later. Let's say you've had a long run where you got large ammounts of green serums that were all drain serums, so much in fact that you got used to not picking them up. Next run, if that same habbit kicks in you might in fact miss a good mod without even realising it. They COULD have implemented the system differently. They could have added a way to sometimes pre-determine a result based on known colours, but they didn't. They could have given unknown mods a "blank" look, and then give the known ones a fixed colour code, but they didn't. They could have let them all have the SAME look and that would be just about as usefull as the curent system but without additional ground for potential confusion. From where I'm standing that looks like a plenty of reasons not to colour them as they are now. Ofcause you can (partialy) pre-determine an unid-ed item's result with sotsdex and a bit of logic, but that's rare and hardly related. A few times I've managed to find out that kind (positive/negative) of effect a mod will have, but seeing how that info is shared among all the remaining mods of a type, colouring doesn't help in this regard in the slightest. For example an old game (chocobo dungeon 2 on PSX) had a system for custom-naming it's unidentified items. There, however, if you had a bit of a know-how you could determine what the item is without even identifing it (knowing the drop lists of a mobs + having identified the rest of his possible drop or, for the most sawwy and persistent, useing cross-reference). There were other reasons for naming unid-ed items, but point is, that game had a system that: 1) let you find out an un-ided item's id without id-ing it, 2) let you keep track of that information, 3) didn't cause any exess confusion, because, you determined what an item is (if you knew that), or that you don't know what it is (if you don't) bthe moment you looked at it/b. They did give them random different names, but that was an instrument used for identification, so in there all those exessive memory links had a purpose. And they were easy to get rid of once they aren't usefull any more (by renaming an item, or by the item itself taking on it's proper name once you "find out" what it does). In light of such comparision, the current colouring system reminds me of a rattle. Fancy and colourfull, but childish, entertainig for a shortest while, but in the long run useless or even detrimental. TLDR: You still have to check the names if you wnat to reliably know that you are dealing with. Colour only causes exessive memory links in the long run, making ground for confussion.